Note: Before you read the following editorial understand that the lie began here:
Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.
In the following essay, Scott Yenor examines the “mandatory ideology” of the emerging regime: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the all-consuming paradigm by which our schools and (in due course) our nation are being reoriented toward the principle of group outcome equality. This is the first in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”
“Under Siege,” reads one headline in the industry-standard Chronicle of Higher Education, “DEI Officers Strategize to Fight Back.” “Leaders Create Informal Support Network Amid DEI Opposition,” reads a headline in Insight into Diversity. Conferences are held to organize resistance. Even “College Presidents Are Quietly Organizing to Support DEI,” reads another Chronicle headline.
An alleged moral necessity underlies this open political defiance. The current environment, it is assumed, is saturated with racism. It must be re-engineered with DEI policies: racial preferences in admissions and hiring, mandatory diversity training, a race-centered curriculum. Peace, harmony, achievement, and opportunity will then reign in workplaces and on campuses—after a generation or so of such policies.
It starts in the ivory tower, but it can hardly be expected to end there. These assumptions—that the present social order is “systemically racist;” that said racism can only be eliminated by the imposition of group outcome equality, supplanting the American idea of equal opportunity—require a whole-of-society approach, a top-to-bottom reorganization. This is the animating ideology of what Tom Klingenstein has called the “group quota regime.”
This ideology—what many Americans now recognize as “wokeism”—has effectively taken over all of the major power centers across our society: not just the universities but the media, the government, the Big Tech giants, the mass media, and more. It is the animating creed of what Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards recently identified as an “emerging totalitarianism.” Adherence is compulsory: consider the professions of faith now required of professors, or the constantly rising phenomenon of “cancellation.” Those who object to its ascendancy, however, should focus more attention on its foundations in academia. Those foundations, even on their own terms, are surprisingly shaky, and may present opportunities for critics of the regime.
The case against DEI, as Prof. Shaun Harper of USC’s Race and Equity Center argues, is based on “misinformation, misunderstanding, and reckless mischaracterizations.” Harper and nearly a dozen well-credentialed colleagues propound these supposed facts in a recent 62-page report, Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation.
DEI not only reduces dignitary harms to underrepresented minorities, they say, it points to a reconstruction of the environment that will foster more student success for all. “By employing a more comprehensive and coordinated approach” to DEI, writes Mitchell Chang of UCLA in the Truths report, “campuses increase their overall organizational cohesiveness and capacity to improve the quality of the educational context.”
Campus Report never acknowledges them. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev’s 2018 article “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work?” from Anthropology Today—an article since expanded into a book from Harvard University Press—is never cited in Truths. Elizabeth Paluck and Donald Green, who wrote or co-authored skeptical meta-analyses on the diversity training literature in both 2009 and 2021, are not cited. Even Katerina Bezrukova et. al., whose 2016 “A Meta-analytical Integration of Over 40 years of Research on Diversity Training Evaluation” is ambiguously supportive of diversity training, is not cited in Truths. Only certain truths are fit to print.
“Hundreds of studies,” write Harvard’s Dobbin and the University of Tel Aviv’s Kalev, “dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior, or change the workplace.” Though “diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program,” it remains popular among institutions who feel they just check the boxes out of concern for legal issues and out of fear that those in the diversity industry will wage public relations campaigns against dissenting institutions.
One problem is that advocate-scholars seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of DEI trainings through surveys. Subjects are surveyed about their attitudes about diversity before trainings and then again after trainings. After the trainings, studies show that subjects are more likely to embrace pro-DEI and anti-stereotype sentiments. Credit for the changes in attitude is consistently attributed to the intervention or the trainings.
The success of diversity programs is too often demonstrated, Devine and Ash conclude, by the simple “completion of the program or its favorable evaluation by the trainees” and data is often “immediate, self-reported, and individual-level” or experimental with very small samples rather than from control groups or long-term testing. So fraught with such scientific limitations is the existing literature about the efficacy of diversity training (DT), that Devine and Ash conclude: “the evidence regarding the efficacy of DT is for the most part wanting. The lack of systemic and rigorous research investigating company-wide DT, combined with the mixed nature of evidence regarding the efficacy of the programs, prevents us from drawing clear conclusions regarding best practices for organizational DT.”
Advocate-scholars promoting diversity training extrapolate broadly from paltry evidence. Scholars like Paluck, Green, et. al. notice “a pattern of smaller studies reporting significantly stronger effects” from diversity training that are blown out of all proportion to the strength of their findings. Studies with large standard errors are treated as dispositive. This, they conclude, is a “symptom of publication bias” when results of a study reveal “optimistic conclusions,” especially to powerful, monied interests.
Studies do not support the idea that diversity training changes much in workplaces or on campuses. The 2009 study of Paluck and Green, of Harvard and Yale respectively, surveyed nearly 1,000 studies and found that few catalogued lasting, positive effects from diversity trainings. There is also a 2008 article from the management literature, where Carol T. Kulick and Loriann Robertson show that 27 out of 31 studies could establish only small, fleeting improvements on one or two of the many items measured. (Kulick and Robertson are also not cited in the Truths.) A 2016 review of 39 studies by business management researchers found only five tried to measure long-term effects; two studies found positive effects, two found negative effects, and one found no effects.
Paluck and Green et.al. conducted a 2021 meta-analysis of over 400 studies evaluating diversity training that were published between 2007 and 2019. Recent trends, the authors conclude, involve taking methods that work in experimental, small-group settings and trying to apply them to broader settings. Such studies show “limited effects on prejudice” and even smaller effects on behavior, suggesting to the authors “the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies” with other kinds of interventions. Over three-quarters of the studies concerned “light-touch” trainings, which encourage, for instance, persons of different races to talk with one another. Only 8% of light-touch studies found a measurable decrease in prejudice one day after the treatment and only 1% had measurable changes a month later. The evidence in support of such trainings “remains thin regarding the broader theoretical claim that light touch interventions set in motion changes in perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.”
A 2022 literature review from Devine and Ash suggests that “the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.” Devine and Ash adopt a more nuanced approach, measuring trainings aimed at increasing minority representation in the workplace by that standard, while trainings aimed at creating equitable health outcomes are measured against those outcomes. So paltry were the results that Devine and Ash recommend “targeting socially connected individuals within an organization” as a means of accomplishing changes in culture rather than continuing with ineffective, expensive diversity training.
than double-down on their analysis and advocacy.
Yet the DEI industry is rallying its “science” and burrowing into renamed offices on campuses and within corporations. Critics of DEI, and of the group quota regime more broadly, must oppose such measures not only with a good conscience, but with the knowledge that they cannot even justify themselves. These policies are based on the idea of a silent race war being waged within our institutions; they threaten internal peace, the ethic of achievement, the cohesion of a community, and the competitive standing of our institutions.
This is precisely the point. The DEI paradigm is no mere academic framework; in fact, it fails as such. It can be understood, and engaged, only as ideology—as the theoretical framework of the emerging totalitarianism. Proof of effectiveness does not matter to its partisans, so much as the enforcement of uniformity and the acquisition of power it entails. It is a monumental experiment in social engineering, aimed not just at the foundations of the university but at the foundations of our republic.
Scott Yenor is Senior Director of State Coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.
Don Gaddes says
As the Solar-induced Dry Cycles orbit the Earth from East to West, (at 15 degrees of Longitude per 30 Day/Night Interval) ; the destruction of water vapour Albedo in the upper atmosphere by the bombardment of the resultant charged Solar Particles, causes temperatures to rise under the path of the Dry Cycles. These temperatures reduce again after the Dry Cycle passes, thus the progressive fluctuating temperatures.
The next Dry Cycles to affect the planet, will be a Regional Dry Cycle,(of Two Year duration), starting from 50 degrees East Longitude, (circa Madagascar) in early August, 2024 – followed by a Minor Dry Cycle, (of One Year duration), starting from 140 degrees East Longitude,(circa Melbourne Australia) in early November 2026.
This will mean severe and prolonged Drought conditions for Africa and Europe starting from Early August 2024.
As both these Dry Cycles start to the West of Australia’s East Coast, the temperatures will remain cooler on the Barrier Reef until January 2026.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TFFDXyhe5b0ZfLCiFt23W4PbubQaQfQo/view?usp=sharing
I recall Alex S. Gaddes quoting Thomas Huxley on Nature to me Jennifer. You must not become disillusioned by it all. The Conservationist will become more important as the
current crop of climate charlatans (and their fantasies), fade into deserved obscurity, to be replaced by observed reality.
Karl Penna says
Hi Jennifer
Such a delight to have such good information that is plebs can digest and counter the narrative we see on main stream media leftist governments
Thank you. Karl Penna. Mapleton
spangled drongo says
Thanks for those fascinating facts re water temps, Jen.
And it is hard to believe that these “experts” have such an objection to going underwater to observe the true state of the corals. Especially when their current errors are so similar to their past ones.
David Houghton says
The real data on water temperatures show the alarmists, as usual, are over-hyping the situation. However, even if there is general warming around the globe it does not prove the so-called greenhouse gases, CO2 and CH4, are the cause. Consistently, the alarmists confuse correlation with causation even though there is abundant evidence to show these gases are not the driver of global temperatures or, even more fanciful, of changes to the climate.
cohenite says
It is just unbelievable that so called government and academic scientists can get away with such fabrications. Jennifer provides evidence of no or little ocean warming but still the lie continues.
For me the real issue is what warms the oceans. CO2 radiation, IFR, cannot heat the ocean, so even if the oceans were warming it would not be due to CO2.
Don Gaddes says
Jennifer, you are correct in your assessment of Sea Surface Temperatures – and the assertion that the ‘surface’ warms the atmosphere – but it becomes a little more complex when one considers the role of Albedo,(Reflectivity) on the amount of Sunlight reaching the surface – and how much is reflected back into Space by water vapour (clouds,) or various aerosol particles, (eg, volcanic activity, or wind-blown dust etc.) Also, a considerable amount of heat is absorbed by various ‘dark’ or semi-reflective surface features, both marine and terrestrial. So, temperature is primarily dependent on Albedo. Sea Surface Temperatures are not a reliable predictor, as they depend on many other factors, such as changing currents, winds and tides. Remember also, the Earth only spins from West to East – the purported movement of ‘El Nino’ from East to West via Sea Surface Temperatures would seem impossible.
Christopher Game says
Coming from Jennifer’s admirable post of today, 2024 Apr 15, in an email. Just taking the opportunity to do some chatting.
Jennifer writes: “If the surface of the ocean is on average warmer than the atmosphere immediately above it, then the direction of heat transfer must be ocean to atmosphere. This is certainly the case in the tropics, driving atmospheric circulation.”
I fully agree with the above remark by Jennifer. I would like to comment a little:
In thermodynamics, heat transfer is one of just three main forms of energy transfer: as heat, as work, and accompanying matter transfer. According to good authority (Max Born, Edward Guggenheim), energy transfer accompanying matter transfer cannot be resolved into heat and work components, at least in classical thermodynamics. In non-equilibrium thermodynamics, people try to do it, but they are probably over-optimistic.
Heat transfer is by conduction, radiation, and friction.
The main energy transfer from ocean to atmosphere is accompanying matter transfer, perhaps about 4/5 of the net total transfer, known as evaporation (this is the principal component feedback of the process considered as caused by added CO2).
Smaller amounts are by radiation, conduction, and friction. Energy transfer, through the kinetic energy of wind, does some mechanical work on the ocean, which eventually appears as heat in the sea (such transfer is sometimes said to be a reason for saying that the earth’s energy transport process is like a “heat engine”; I don’t like that story; I think it is too metaphorical: the energy ends up as heat if you consider the wave motion to be frictional.) There will also be simple friction between wind and wave; I don’t know how this pans out as a net frictional transfer one way or the other.
Jennifer is wise to say that “this is certainly the case in the tropics”. That says the main thing. There is also a small contributory back transfer as heat from atmosphere to sea or ice in the polar winter. And yes, importantly, it is “driving atmospheric circulation” (classified in thermodynamics as convective circulation of matter).
It is also important to remember so-called ‘back radiation’. Radiative transfer between two bodies is the net of two one-way transfer components, according to the Helmholtz reciprocity principle. The net is always from the hotter to the colder body; this is part of the burden of the second law of thermodynamics, referring to radiation. The mainly relevant part of the atmosphere is the troposphere, which is mainly colder than the surface. (As a fine point, it is not just the temperature of the immediately contiguous atmosphere; the atmosphere is semi-transparent to infrared radiation, so that its whole temperature and moisture profile is to be considered.) The overall net radiative transfer between condensed matter surface and atmosphere pans out to be about perhaps 3% of emitted infrared radiation from surface to atmosphere. We cannot be sure of the exact amount, because it is hard to define or know the temperatures of the surface and of the nearly contiguous atmosphere, and other things, such as the emissivity of the surface.
Kevin says
“New data shows the Great Barrier Reef has suffered through its worst-ever heat stress with more than 80% of reefs enduring dangerous levels of heating (more than 4 Degree Heating Weeks), as scientists grapple to quantify the irreparable, cumulative damage from repeated such events.
Surveys show widespread coral bleaching affecting an area likened in size to the land burned during the Black Summer fires. Marine scientists have reported coral bleaching at greater depths of the ocean than previously recorded, and centuries-old corals succumbing to the extreme heat.
Reports from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States, and other experts show that:
The Great Barrier Reef as a whole has been subject to a greater level of heat stress than during any of the previous six mass bleaching events (See Figure 1).
Almost half (46%) of the individual reefs that form the Great Barrier Reef experienced record heat stress. (Based on analysis of data from NOAA Coral Reef Watch.)
More than 60% of individual reefs across the Great Barrier Reef have shown “prevalent bleaching” (GBRMPA – Reef Health Update, 12 April 2024).
cohenite says
“New data shows the Great Barrier Reef has suffered through its worst-ever heat stress with more than 80% of reefs enduring dangerous levels of heating (more than 4 Degree Heating Weeks), as scientists grapple to quantify the irreparable, cumulative damage from repeated such events.”
Yet Jennifer has shown NO increase in ocean temperature.
And CO2 does not heat water.